English


EN105H
Writing Seminar II: A Question of Faith
Prof. Sarah Goodwin

In this course we look at faith from the starting position that it is an intrinsic part of life—impossible to avoid, in fact—rather than as a phenomenon confined to the overtly religious sphere.  We do, however, also concern ourselves with religion and spirituality.  What is it to have a 'spiritual' attitude toward life?  What kind of faith does it entail?  Can one have faith—religious or not—without being spiritual at all?  There is a basic theoretical bearing to the course, but without technical jargon, and another basic concern is to expose ourselves to as many different aspects of the question as we can comfortably handle in a semester.  In doing this we read and discuss song lyrics, poems, short stories, essays or extracts from longer works, and mythic or religious texts from different world traditions, and watch an occasional film.  Authors/thinkers include William James, Plato, Pindar, Saul Bellow, Willa Cather, Mary Karr, John Keats, Robert Frost, John Updike, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Charles Darwin.  The emphasis and texts vary from semester to semester.  About 20 pages total of graded (revisable) essays over the semester, plus much short ungraded 'homework' writing.

 

EN105H
Writing Seminar II: The Land of Absurdity
Prof. Martha Wiseman

This course will take us into the land of absurdity, as mapped by fiction writers, filmmakers, poets, and playwrights. We will venture into regions of dark humor, charged outrage, searing satire, and profound silliness, with the aid of such guides as Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Jarry, Donald Barthelme, Flann O'Brien, Eugène Ionesco, and the patron saint of serious exuberance, François Rabelais. We will see the absurd as brought to us on screen by Luis Buñuel, the Marx Brothers, Terry Gilliam, and Lindsay Anderson. Sinister, ludicrous, surreal, irreverent, or all of the above, these portrayals and explorations will help us to think about, and especially to write about, the absurdity we might find in our own lives. We will ask, How do these visions illuminate our own dilemmas?  How, in other words, can absurd perspective help us to live? How does an appreciation of paradox deepen and free our thinking? How can chaos and incoherence be shaped—how is incoherence made coherent? Thus, the relationship between certainty and chaos, the disjunction between seeing and knowing, the blurred distinctions among sense, senselessness, and nonsense, the uses of satire, and the mingling of the sublime and the ridiculous will serve as catalysts for our writing as well as for our discussions. Our writing practice will emphasize understanding and developing our own writing processes. Students will write frequent short papers of several types—personal, analytical, persuasive, reflective—and three substantial essays, submitted first as drafts and then in careful revision.


EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Sanity and Madness
Prof. Martha Wiseman   

The struggle to define sanity and madness is both problematical and irresistible.  To what degree can we define these terms, and why do we find it necessary?  In this seminar, we will explore the ways in which images of sanity and madness, along with treatments for those considered mad, have altered over time; the extent to which categories of mental illness may be considered social constructs; the roles of gender and class in the formation and breakdown of these categories; and the possible—or mythic—relations between art and madness.  We will look at portrayals of madness in short stories, poetry, memoirs, journalism, case histories, philosophical and psychological inquiries, the visual arts, and films, all of which will provide fodder for discussion and written work.  Our writing practice will emphasize understanding and developing our own writing processes.  To this end, the course will require frequent short papers of several types—personal, analytical, and reflective—and three longer essays, submitted first as drafts and then in substantially revised form.

 

 
EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Childhood Dramas
Prof. Melora Wolff

The assumption that childhood provides a drama—a coherent story that gains momentum and meaning through intense conflict—provides the catalyst for our investigation of profound and disturbing childhood narratives. We begin by questioning assumptions about and definitions of childhood: what is “innocence”? What are the central conflicts we associate with childhood? What forces define the boundary between childhood and moral adulthood? Using several memoirs, fictions, and dramatic and documentary films, we will examine some specific influential elements of childhood dramas: religion, gender, race, exile, fantasy, disability. Our goal is to gain insight into the extremity of childhood experience and, through thinking and writing, to discover practical response, even compassionate remedy. Students compose well-crafted essays on selected issues, with attention to the demands of writing about literature and film. Possible memoirists: Alexandra Fuller, Doris Pilkington, Lucy Grealy, Marguerite Duras and Edwidge Danticat. Possible films: Spirit of the Beehive, Ma Vie En Rose, Empire of the Sun, Born into Brothels, The Italian, Ponette.  This course requires written exercises, four major papers (drafted and revised), as well as mandatory workshop discussion of prose and mandatory discussion of texts and ideas.

 

 EN105H
Writing Seminar II: America, In Extreme
Prof. Barbara Black

This course focuses on a single but provocative question: What does it mean to be an American in the 1990s? We will begin with a novel from the 1980s that proved prophetic of our current cultural predicament, Don DeLillo's White Noise. This work forces us to investigate the presence and influence of technology in our lives. Introducing us to the cultural condition commonly called postmodernism, this novel will also launch the three main sections of the course, called "American Gothic," "Sense of an American Ending," and "Surviving in America." Whether it be the phenomena of Gothicism, millennialism, or survivalism, we will devote our time in this course to myths, symbols, and narratives of finality in American contemporary culture. EN 105H focuses on argumentation. The class will investigate how to use sources--how to analyze them, how to incorporate them, how to marshal them as substantiation, and how to challenge or question them.

 

 
EN105H
Writing Seminar II: American Dreams
Prof. Barbara Black

America is a country long mythified as a place where dreams come true, a land that boasts a signature fantasy called the American Dream. What, however, are the dreams of twenty-first-century America? What do these fantasies reveal about our values, and what role do these dreams play in the construction of our personal and collective identities? To investigate these questions, we will explore the places of the American dream-world where our fantasies are scripted and squandered, fought for and fulfilled. These places can be as diverse as cinema, malls, “McMansions,” and the web. Topics up for discussion include nostalgia in the Natural History Museum, cool fashion at Rem Koolhaas’s Prada Store in Soho, and convenience and speed in a “fast-food nation.”


 
EN105H
Writing Seminar II: American Gothic
Prof. Barbara Black

This course examines the rich tradition of the Gothic in modern America, ranging from the paintings of Grant Wood to the films of Alfred Hitchcock to the fiction of Don DeLillo. How does one define and understand the Gothic? If the standard Gothic plot fixates on the secret behind the haunted house’s locked door, we will attempt to shed light on the hidden cultural preoccupations and anxieties that lurk there. Is modern America haunted? And by what? By whom? Why?




EN105H
Writing Seminar II: The Beast Within
Humans and Animals in the Middle Ages
Prof. Karen Greenspan
 
The question of what makes human beings distinct from animals has occupied thinkers from earliest antiquity to our own time.  Current debates on animal rights as well as modern attempts to define human nature in biological, social, and physiological terms draw upon ancient arguments, especially upon some that developed under the influence of Christianity in the Middle Ages.  In this course, we will read and write about animals and humans in medieval European and modern American society, approaching the subject from a variety of angles, literary, an artistic, legal, theoretical, historical, and scientific.  Assignments will include four formal papers with revisions, participation in class discussion, especially workshops, several short exercises and a journal.

EN105H
Writing Seminar II: College Upside Down
Prof. Steven Pearlman

Oscar Wilde once said that "education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." Is that true?
It it is true, or if it holds a measure of truth, then why are we here in college at all? What is the purpose and outcome not just of what we learn but of how we learn? What is the subtext of education in its current form and how might it be changed? What is the line between education and indoctrination, and how are we to know when we cross it, or if we already have done so?
College Upside-down will challenge students with and alternative approach to writing, thinking, and learning. It will force its participants to rethink nature of the educational experience itself. It will question the nature of knowledge and its brother, wisdom, as well as the nature of studentship, empowerment, and collaboration.Readings from Paulo Freire, John Gatto, Noam Chomsky, Howard Gardner, and Neil Postman will facilitate discussion about the nature of education and its connection to reasoning and humanization.
Take this course if you've ever sat in a class and wondered why.

  

 
EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Conceptions of the Self

Students in this course concentrate on improving their writing skills in general and on their ability to develop and support a thesis in particular. They study a rhetoric (Sheridan Baker's The Practical Stylist), do writing exercises, and analyze regularly the worth of each other's essays, the content of which derives largely from fiction by Henry James (Daisy Miller); Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle); Milan Kundera ("The Hitchhiking Game"); and John Barth (The End of the Road). Supplementing conceptions of selfhood explored in LSI, a thematic and increasingly challenging progression informs the sequential arrangement of readings.

 

EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Making Documentaries
Prof. Tom Lewis

Documentary films and videos tell true stories in non-dramatic fashion. Students in "Making Documentaries" will view, discuss and write about a number of documentary films. Their work for the semester will lead to a final project in which small groups of students will develop, research, write, direct, shoot, and edit their own documentary video. There will be weekly reading and writing assignments. Selections from film journals and reviews will be handed out each week. In addition, students should purchase the Skidmore Guide to Writing.

 

 
 EN105H
Writing Seminar II: The Mind's I
Prof. Linda Simon

The unconscious is not an object or place or part of the body, but an imaginary construction. What it is, where it is, what it contains, and how it relates to the conscious self are questions that have generated vastly different responses from scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers, who have represented the unconscious metaphorically in various and colorful ways: as a repository of memories, as a primal wilderness, as a labyrinthine archaeological site, as an edifice of remarkably intricate architecture. In this class, we will examine writings about the unconscious by physicians (including Freud), neurologists (such as Antonio Damasio or Oliver Sacks), artists (such as surrealist painters), fiction writers (those interested in the gothic, supernatural, and uncanny, for example), and philosophers to ask how each vision of the unconscious reflects the writer’s beliefs about human nature, free will, responsibility of the individual to the community, sources of creativity, and, not least, one’s sense of true self.

 



EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Monsters and the Monstrous
Prof. Phyllis Roth

As the basis for progressively rigorous college study and achievement, we will read a series of works suggesting some of the ways in which monstrous characters/characters as monsters have represented either the dark sides of our psyches or the figure of "the other" – or perhaps both; this consideration will include some readings in psychoanalytic and literary theory.  Students can expect to read, discuss, and write about material such as Dracula, the case studies of Oliver Sacks, Lolita, Native Son, and the Hottentot Venus, as well as to view several videos; in small group sessions, to become sophisticated in evaluating each others' writing as a means of improving their own revision skills; and to engage in increasingly challenging reading and writing assignments, leading to a final research-driven project.

 


EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Nature of Comedy
Prof. Karen Greenspan

Comedy has always delighted, dismayed, and persuaded.  The nature of comedy, though, that mode or genre so successful as a means of delivering an argument or positing social change, has been much debated:  [psychology, biology, sociology, philosophy and literature have all weighed in on the subject.  In this course we will read some of the more important theories of comedy, laughter and humor and look carefully at our own ideas about what is funny and what funny means.  And, of course, we will read comic stories, essays, and jokes, listen to comic songs, view film comedies, and look at other venues in which comedy provides the way in to deeper levels of meaning.  Students will write four formal papers which will be discussed in small groups outside of class and in full-class peer-critique sessions.  Showings of three or four films will take place outside of class, at a time convenient for the majority of students.  The class will propose a panel for Academic Festival, in which all will participate as either presenters, editors or coaches.


EN 105H
Writing Seminar II: The Reader Within
Prof. Catherine Golden

This course looks historically at one complex and provocative question: What does it mean to be a reader? More specifically, how does reading-or the inability to read-form a part of one's identity? What books specifically have influenced the reader within each of us? As we explore these ideas, we will look back at the nineteenth century, a time when many feared the consequences of women pursuing higher education. We will explore, as well, the consequences of literacy and illiteracy today. Readings will include autobiographical writings of Malcolm X and Helen Keller and Bernhard Schlink's challenging novel - The Reader - (1995). We will examine paintings and illustrations featuring the figure of the reader. Students will also have an opportunity to examine their own identities as reader. This Honors section of EN105 is designed to help students to hone their visual and verbal analytic skills, develop thoughtful arguments, and cultivate a sophisticated writing style.



EN105H
Writing Seminar II: The Story Within
Prof. Phil Boshoff

We will use literary and semiotic analysis to write about the ways in which our knowledge of narrative stories forms the building blocks for our individual and group identity and for our interpretation of cultural objects and events. We will define and redefine "story" as we study its characteristics and applications across communities, cultures, and media. We will begin by studying story elements (word, natural narrative, metaphor, symbol, myth, archetype) and story type (fairy tales, fish stories, and urban legends), and we will analyze their presence in and influence upon song lyrics, cinema, and television. In the second half of the course, we will take up transformations of word and story into object and event. Guided by our two textbooks, we will examine the ways stories represent and reproduce themselves in other guises; for example, as objects from the market place (toys, cars, fashion and personal possessions), as events (school lunch and rock concerts), and as media forms (cartoons, weather reports, talk radio, gossip columns)> We will find that story is the ghostly presence within such seemingly disparate phenomena. Moreover, our work with story and semiotic analysis will show us that the deceptive familiarity of the mundane often masks deeper significance than that which initially meets the eye. But we may also agree that a cigar is just a cigar--then, again, perhaps not. The class will meet in the Lanzit Center, a networked electronic classroom, which will allow us to use bulletin boards and chat room exchanges in our consideration of expository writing and course theme.

EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Utopian Visions
Prof. Linda Simon

What is an ideal society? This section of EN105H will focus on several important utopian visions, including Thomas More's Utopia, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and some contemporary imaginings. Our readings, discussions, and writing will consider questions about human nature and potential, equality and opportunity, freedom and social control and, not least, the place in utopias for creative, and perhaps subversive, citizens.



EN105H
Writing Seminar II: Writing from the Times
Prof. Phyllis Roth

The impact of science and technology on our lives, our bodies, our ambitions, and our futures is beyond overstatement.  Informed citizens, curious minds, and college graduates must be conversant with the interdisciplinary study and effects of science, its theories and its areas of research.  Aimed at students uncertain of their ability to appreciate science as well as those considerably more comfortable, this course will enable us to explore in writing contemporary issues in science, to appreciate the multiple disciplines and implications entailed in good thinking about science and technology, and to do research into topics of particular interest to the individual student, sharing the results of this work in writing and oral presentation.  In short, the course aims at developing an appreciation of the inescapability, the fascination, and the implications of scientific work.
The spine of our reading for the semester will come from The New York Times, which has long set the bar for in-depth reporting and excellent writing.  Every Tuesday the Science Section of the Times lives up to these standards, featuring stories that are significant – sometimes crucial – timely, and provocative, on subjects ranging from Alzheimer's to zebras, from stem cell research to the status of Pluto as a planet, from global warming to hemoglobin – all aimed at a general audience.  The body of the course will derive from the products of student exploration and research, as well as from the following:  writing about science in collections such as Best American Science and Nature Writing, many of the articles in which were originally published in the New Yorker magazine; and a study of human origins through the Genographic Project, sponsored by National Geographic.
Students will be asked to write at least four papers, several in multiple drafts, based on topics of particular interest to them from the readings and their own research across a variety of pertinent disciplines – for example, anthropology, political science, art history, ethics, and the natural sciences.  The learning objectives for the course include incorporating research naturally and systematically into consideration of any topic; enhancing appreciation of issues falling within the purview of science and technology; internalizing essential revision techniques; and writing lucid, intelligent, and vivid expository prose.

 

 

EN105H
 Writing Seminar II: Writing on Demand
The Art of the Occasional Essay
 Prof. Linda Hall
  
The undergraduate has more in common with the professional essayist than with any other kind of writer. The essayist generally writes "on deadline," "to space," and at the request of an opinionated editor. The student writer must contend with due dates, prescribed lengths, set topics, and professorial preferences. And yet despite these pressures, essayists have produced some of the most celebrated and influential work of the past century. In this course, we will read occasional essays--writing occasioned by a political event, a cultural artifact, the publication of a book--to learn how to combine duty with pleasure in arguments that are memorable for stylistic verve as well as analytical rigor. We will proceed from the assumption that no reader will be engaged if the writer is not. How do we inject personality into writing that is not personal? How can required writing attract a non-specialist audience? What lends a great shortorder essay its enduring interest? In addition to writing four formal essays and several informal exercises, students will be expected to attend regular conferences with the instructor.




EN201H
 Evolving Canon I
 Prof. Karen Greenspan

The first of a coordinated pair of course offering instruction in key writers, important texts, and the historical sequence of literary movements from classical, continental, British, and American literature. Evolving Canon I extends chronologically through the first half of the seventeenth century. Intended as a foundation for the English major, this course establishes a shared experience of texts and concepts. Required of all majors as reparartion for 300-level courses. Evolving Canon I is a prerequisite for Evolving Canon II.

 


 EN205D H
Honors Special Topics In Non-Fiction Writing:
Documentary Film Writing
Prof. Tom Lewis

Students in “Documentary Film Writing” will view, discuss, and write about current documentary films that deal with a variety of historical, environmental, social, and cultural subjects. In addition to completing five writing assignments on a variety of film topics, each student will research, write, shoot, and edit a twenty to thirty minute long documentary. The primary object of this course is to improve your writing skills, help you develop your own voice, and enable you to recognize the qualities of clear and effective writing. Prerequisite: completion of college expository writing requirement. Recommended preparation: prior study of documentary film.




EN211
Fiction
Prof. Linda Simon

The honors component enriches the work of EN 211 by focusing on three authors and allowing students to examine, discuss, and write about thematic and stylistic patterns in these authors' works; to discover how critics generate questions, develop their assertions, and support those assertions with evidence; and to make connections between biographical contexts and creative works.

 

EN211
Fiction
Prof. Phil Boshoff

At its best, literary criticism is not an abstract, intellectual exercise, but an enriching, natural human response to literary works. The Honors Forum Workshop will allow students to look deeply into additional fiction from three authors' studies in the EN211 course. The main work of the course will involve "reading in slow motion," rereading each author's work with an eye trained on language, symbolism, recurrent stylistic patterns and themes. Traditional literary scholarship on and non-traditional approaches (both print and web-based) to these works will be springboards for our own interpretations of them. Requirements are two short papers and one class project/report. Students must be enrolled in EN211 to take the course add-on.



EN213
Poetry

EN 213 is primarily a course in close reading and practical criticism of poetic works. Students electing to enroll in the one credit Workshop will meet for an additional hour in order to discuss some of the “classical” definitions of poetry, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and including some Renaissance theories, passages from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Coleridge, Keats, Arnold, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. An extra paper will be expected for these students.

 

EN228H
Victorian Illustrated Book
Prof. Catherine Golden 

This course studies the form of the Victorian illustrated book with attention to genre, illustration, critical analysis, and creative practice.  Part of the adult reading experience, images did not simply embellish the Victorian illustrated book as we often conceive of illustration today; rather, pictures added meaning to a text, which, in turn, influenced how an audience "read" illustrations, a vital part of this literary form. The class will focus on illustrated novels, picture-poems, and critical studies in aesthetics and literature which discern how a poem is like and different from a picture (the "ut pictura poesis" tradition) or comment upon the collaboration of image and word as an art form. Special attention will be given to the poem and painting pairs of D.G. Rossetti; the illustrated fiction of Dickens, Carroll, and Potter; the aesthetic ideas of Horace, Plato, and Lessing; expository writing; and primary research.  Weekly writing assignments will encourage students to "read" illustrations and texts much like their Victorian audience once did and to explore different modes of exposition. Students will put on a library exhibition and create an illustrated text.

 

 
EN229E H
Medieval Lyric
Prof. Karen Greenspan

This course will introduce you to the rich body of medieval lyric poetry,  from the late classical period through the Middle Ages (c. 400-c.1500). We will read songs of love and war, meditations, satires, charms and prayers composed by wandering students, noble troubadors, revolutionary stilnovisti, devout friars and riddling bards. We will learn about the traditions within which they wrote and the innovations they wrought. Further, we will consider issues of translation, performance, and literacy in the context of the sometimes competing, sometimes complementary cultures of secular society and the medieval Church. We will read most of the poems in translation, except for those in Middle English, which we will learn to read in the original. We will also read some modern essays that will teach us more about medieval culture and its poetry. Assignments will include three papers, a journal, group presentations and active participation in class, including reading aloud. Fulfills the early period requirement for students in the new major.

 

EN303H
 Peer Tutoring
 Prof. Phil Boshoff

The study of rhetoric, grammar, composition theory, and collaborative learning as training to become a peer tutor of writing. Course work includes weekly writing assignments from the English 103 curriculum, presentations on grammar and punctuation, oral reports on scholarly issues pertaining to composition research and pedagogy, and a term project related to rhetorical theory, collaborative learning, or writing instruction. Each EN303H student works throughout the term with two students enrolled in English 103. After successfully completing EN303H, students are invited to join the staff of The Skidmore Writing Center as paid tutors. Students wishing to enroll in EN303H should be strong and confident writers, who are familiar with rules of grammar and punctuation and have good communications skills. Prior to enrolling in the course, students need a professor's recommendation and must submit a writing sample. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Instructor's signature required for enrollment.


EN342H
Chaucer
 Prof. Karen Greenspan
In this course you will experience one of the most delightful adventures in reading you will ever have: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In preparation for that marvelous, incomplete masterpiece, we will begin with his earliest dream vision, the funny and moving The Book of the Duchess. We will read Chaucer in Middle English only, but don't be afraid. Middle English is easy to learn and is full of thrilling linguistic surprises. You will wish we still spoke a language so rich in nuance and humor. The effort required to master it will be repaid ten times over by the surprise and delight his works afford. Requirements include regular attendance and participation, daily reading aloud, an oral presentation, eight two-to-three-page essays, and a longer paper, to whose development we will give attention throughout the semester. Fulfills the early period requirement for English majors.

 

 
EN351
English Romanticism
 Prof. Sarah Goodwin
Prof. Barbara Black

Studies in English romanticism, its philosophic and psychological departures from neoclassic poetry, and its consequences for modern literature. Emphasis on the major works of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Prerequisite: Completion of the Introductory Requirement.  

 

 

EN363C
Special Studies: Nature's Nation:
US Literary History and the Natural World
 Prof. Jinyoung Mason

This course will examine the relationship between the natural world and American literary history. To that end, we will, first of all, read literary texts that address the natural world and humans' relationship to it. Concentrating on the period between the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, we will consider how American literature has both shaped and been shaped by attitudes towards and encounters with nature. (Readings will include such authors as Irving, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Stowe, Jewett, Twain, Chesnutt, London, and Faulkner) At the same time, we will also examine how the issue of "nature" has circulated in critical debates about America and its literary traditions. Our conversations will cover: the environmentally determinist  theories of American literature advanced in the mid-twentieth century; the challenges to and expansions of those theories in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s (which led to revisions of the traditional American literary canon); and recent attempts to retheorize the relationship between literature and the physical environment.
Students enrolled in this course may earn an additional credit by completing a service learning project related to their coursework.